Overview

Eerdmans’ Interventions series scrutinizes the popular and cultural lenses by which modern theological thought is (often unknowingly) studied. Featuring introductions as critical as they are timely, these pivotal studies analyze theologians and philosophical movements that have had a long-lasting impact on modern theology. Coming from the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham, England, Interventions is a genuinely interdisciplinary series of mediations of crucial concepts and key figures in contemporary thought.

In the Logos editions, these volumes are enhanced by amazing functionality. Scripture citations link directly to English translations, and important terms link to dictionaries, encyclopedias, and a wealth of other resources in your digital library. Perform powerful searches to find exactly what you’re looking for. Take the discussion with you using tablet and mobile apps. With Logos Bible Software, the most efficient and comprehensive research tools are in one place, so you get the most out of your study.

Naturalism

This volume introduces readers to the dominant scientifically oriented worldview called naturalism. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro examine naturalism philosophically, evaluating its strengths and weaknesses. Whereas most other books on naturalism are written for professional philosophers alone, this one is aimed primarily at a college-educated audience interested in learning about this pervasive worldview.

Goetz and Taliaferro are qualified by an impressive record of relevant scholarly publications, but the book is concise and accessible to nonspecialists. . . . This book makes a strong, concise defense of theism and dualism and responds effectively to the best naturalist critics.

—Christian Research Journal

The best brief, yet comprehensive, treatment of naturalism to appear. . . . This book may be expected to enjoy a wide readership. For the minister, it will serve to expose the irrationality of naturalism in its attack on the supernaturalism that is foundational to our faith. For the educated layperson, particularly the scientist, it sets forth the contours of scientism . . . and serves to encourage the believing scientist to remember that what is foundational to science is not of the nature of science.

—Mid-America Journal of Theology

Charles Taliaferro is professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century.

Stewart Goetz is professor of philosophy at Ursinus College. He has authored numerous scholarly articles for such publications as Faith and Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, and Mind.

The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa

Author: Johannes Hoff

Series: Interventions (INTS)

Publisher: Eerdmans

Publication Date: 2013

Pages: 267

According to Johannes Hoff, societies today are characterized by their inability to reconcile seemingly black-and-white scientific rationality with the ambiguity of postmodern pop culture. In the face of this crisis, The Analogical Turn recovers the fifteenth-century thinker Nicholas of Cusa’s alternative vision of modernity to develop a fresh perspective on the challenges of our time.

In contrast to his mainstream contemporaries, Cusa’s appreciation of individuality, creativity, and scientific precision was deeply rooted in the analogical rationality of the Middle Ages. He revived and transformed the tradition of scientific realism in a manner that now, retrospectively, offers new insights into the “completely ordinary chaos” of postmodern everyday life.

Hoff’s original study offers a new vision of the history of modernity and the related secularization narrative, a deconstruction of the basic assumptions of postmodernism, and an unfolding of a liturgically grounded concept of common-sense realism.

The Analogical Turn by Johannes Hoff for the first time locates Nicholas of Cusa without anachronism as a post-nominalist realist, who reworked the inherited analogical vision of Christian theology in a simultaneously late Gothic and Renaissance manner. As Hoff explains, this idiom offers us a new way forward today. . . . Much more than a monograph on a historical figure, this imaginatively crafted and extremely scholarly volume constitutes one of the most significant works of theology in the twenty-first century so far. I believe that it will exert a very considerable influence on future theoretical reflections both within theology and without.

—John Milbank, professor in religion, politics, and ethics, University of Nottingham

Johannes Hoff is professor of systematic theology at Heythrop College in the University of London. He previously taught at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. His other works include Kontingenz, Berührung, Überschreitung: Zur philosophischen Propädeutik christlicher Mystik nach Nikolaus von Kues and Spiritualität und Sprachverlust: Theologie nach Foucault und Derrida.

Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy

This comprehensive and detailed study of individuation reveals the theological nature of metaphysics. Adrian Pabst argues that ancient and modern conceptions of “being”—or individual substance—fail to account for the ontological relations that bind beings to each other and to God, their source. On the basis of a genealogical account of rival theories of creation and individuation from Plato to ‘postmodernism,’ Pabst proposes that the Christian Neo-Platonic fusion of biblical revelation with Greco-Roman philosophy fulfills and surpasses all other ontologies and conceptions of individuality.

This bold new study argues for the pivotal importance of the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and the theology of participation in the development of western metaphysics and political thought, and explores their subsequent degeneration and decline when, in modernity, these teachings were forgotten or discarded. A clarion call to recover the economy of love, grounded in the gift, and a welcome new voice in political philosophy.

—Janet Soskice, professor of philosophical theology, University of Cambridge

Adrian Pabst is lecturer in politics at the University of Kent and fellow of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy. He is the editor of many volumes, most recently The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI’s Social Encyclical and the Future of Political Economy.

Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction

Author: Nicholas M. Healy

Series: Interventions (INTS)

Publisher: Eerdmans

Publication Date: 2014

Pages: 160

Stanley Hauerwas is one of the most important and robustly creative theologians of our time, and his work is well known and much admired. But Nicholas Healy—himself an admirer of Hauerwas’s thought—believes that it has not yet been subjected to the kind of sustained critical analysis that is warranted by such a significant and influential Christian thinker. As someone interested in the broader systematic-theological implications of Hauerwas’s work, Healy fills that gap in Hauerwas: A (Very) Critical Introduction.

After a general introduction to Hauerwas’s work, Healy examines three main areas of his thought: his method, his social theory, and his theology. According to Healy, Hauerwas’s overriding concern for ethics and church-based apologetics so dominates his thinking that he systematically distorts Christian doctrine. Healy illustrates what he sees as the deficiencies of Hauerwas’s theology and argues that it needs substantial revision.

Nicholas M. Healy is professor of theology and religious studies at St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York. His other books include Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology and Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life.

Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction

The enormously prolific Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was marginalized during much of his life, but his reputation over time has only continued to grow. He was said to be the favorite theologian of John Paul II and is held in high esteem by Benedict XVI. It is not uncommon to hear him referred to as the great Catholic theologian of the twentieth century.

In Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction Karen Kilby argues that although the low regard in which Balthasar was held from the 1950s to 1960s was not justified, neither is the current tendency to lionize him. Instead, she advocates a more balanced approach, particularly in light of a fundamental problem in his writing, namely, his characteristic authorial voice—an over-reaching “God’s eye” point of view that contradicts the content of his theology.

With an exceptional knowledge both of Balthasar’s vast corpus and of the burgeoning secondary literature on him, Karen Kilby has given us a highly perceptive and accessible analysis of the influential Swiss theologian’s work and legacy. Her book is always fair-minded, but it is also unerringly incisive and tenacious in its argument that Balthasar’s project has a ‘performative contradiction’ at its heart. She is as attentive to his method and habits of mind (where so many of his vulnerabilities lie) as to the explicit content of what he says. By denying Balthasar the status of sacred cow, Kilby ensures that he will remain a much more useful and productive source of nourishment for the next generation of theologians.

—Ben Quash, professor of Christianity and the arts, King’s College London

Karen Kilby exposes the plotline of Balthasar’s formidable opus and proceeds to offer circumspect criticism of the supremely confident modes of expression his speculation can take. With grammar as a critical tool, she inquires trenchantly what might allow this ‘theological novelist’ to know his divine characters so well as to spin the story he does.

This book should be essential reading for anybody interested in contemporary Catholicism and its most flamboyant theologian. Kilby approaches her subject with a lucidity and balance that are rare in studies of Hans Urs von Balthasar. While meticulously careful to avoid gratuitous criticism, she offers a timely caution against the uncritical acceptance of Balthasar’s work and its influence on much recent theology and doctrine.

—Tina Beattie, professor of Catholic studies, University of Roehampton

Karen Kilby is associate professor of systematic theology at the University of Nottingham, England.

Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction

It has been the brilliance of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek to uniquely weave theology, psychoanalysis, and politics together into stunning commentary on contemporary culture. Assuming little prior knowledge of this controversial (atheist, communist) philosopher, Marcus Pound provides the first comprehensive, systematic account of Žižek’s work as it relates specifically to theology and religious studies.

With clarity and humor, and in wonderfully short compass, Marcus Pound introduces the thought of not only Slavoj Žižek but also his guru, Jacques Lacan. Pound finds in these masters of inversion a profound anti-theology that only needs to become more theological—more orthodox—in order to work, to rid us of complacency. This is a book for those new to Žižek and for those who, knowing him already, want to know him newly—as the theologian he might almost be. It’s as enjoyable as reading Žižek himself.

—Gerard Loughlin, professor, Durham University

Marcus Pound is research fellow in Catholic studies at Durham University and assistant director of the Durham Centre for Catholic Studies.

Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of the greatest conundrums in the modern philosophical world, alternatingly inspiring and mind-bogglingly frustrating. In this critical introduction S. J. McGrath offers not a comprehensive summary of Heidegger but a series of incisive takes on Heidegger’s thought, leading readers to a point from which they can begin or continue their own relationship with him.

In this gracefully written text Sean McGrath provides a clear reading of Heidegger and an incisive critique of his ontology, ethics, politics, and theology. McGrath anchors his critique in two positions that Heidegger claimed to have surpassed—classical metaphysics and Christian humanism. While it may not convince mainstream Heideggerians, this work opens a discussion that merits serious attention from postmetaphysical and postmodern thinkers.

—Thomas Sheehan, professor, Stanford University

S. J. McGrath is assistant professor of philosophy at Memorial University at Newfoundland and the author of The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken.